HEFE'S REVIEW OF:
ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS

OPENING THOUGHTS

    When I first saw the previews for this movie, naturally my first thoughts went directly to rape. I thought, here we go again, the movie industry is trying to cash in on old TV shows that people have a soft spot for by ruining any sense of individuality the show had and pretty much just raping it for every last dollar it had inside it. As if that wasn't bad enough, the raping was going to be played primarily for children! The horror! But the more I thought about it, this particular cartoon was really based around a gimmick. Simply speed up the sound on existing songs to make the voices sound higher, and bam, you pretty much have the concept. So by the time I watched this with my daughter, I felt a little bit better about letting her watch this live-action rape.

ACTING

    JASON LEE is someone I used to respect, someone I used to look forward to seeing in movies. But lately it seems like he is becoming a whore and just blindly agreeing to do anything and everything as long as the price is right. Which may explain his recent mildly amusing cameo in that snuff movie. It didn't even seem like he was trying, and why would he, he is playing opposite three furry fucks that aren't even there, any a movie not many grown people will see.
    DAVID CROSS is another person that I normally enjoy, but for the life of me I can't imagine why he agreed to be in this movie. The humor that makes Cross so great is hardly PG, so putting him in this movie is like the equivalent of cutting off a cat's whiskers and throwing him in a dark room. It's not as funny as you might think, and in some ways it is hard to watch. But at least he tried, he had a bunch of energy, which is nice, I suppose.
    THE SUPPORTING CAST that I want to talk about is really just the voices of the chipmunks. First off I can't understand why they got even semi-notable people to voice the chipmunks. Seriously you cannot tell who is voicing any of them because their voices are skewed beyond recognition. You could have paid a homeless person in dollar menu items and Hamms to read the lines and it would not have sounded any different. I certainly hope they didn't pay very much to get Justin Long, Jesse McCartney and Matthew Gray Gubler to do the voices.

DIRECTION AND SCRIPT

    TIM HILL who has directed such classics as Garfield: A Tail Of Two Kitties and Max Keeble's Big Movie took the director's chair, simply because someone had to, and really why not this guy. I am sure he napped through most of the filming, and who can blame him? If you don't believe me than consider this, I am writing this review in early 2009, they have just announced the director for the sequel to this movie, and it has a release date of Christmas of this year. The animation alone takes well over a year to complete on a movie this big. So that means the animation has to be pretty much done at this point in order to film the rest of the live action stuff. So half of the movie is done without any director's input, which does not leave a whole lot of wiggle room for creativity in the rest. So that should tell you about how important a director is to a movie like this.
    JON VITTI, WILL MCROBB and CHRIS VISCARDI wrote the script for this movie, and all I can say is: "really?" It took three grown men to come up with a plot for this movie? Aren't you ashamed of that in anyway? Also I would like to say how much I like the name McRobb, if I was that guy I would compare my name to the McRib sandwich in sexual situations constantly. Now as for the story, surprisingly there was some things I liked. First off, I liked the fact that they didn't abandon completely what made The Chipmunks famous. In fact the songs that catapult the critters to fame in this movie were the same songs that originally made them famous. Of course they then bowed down and started singing current shitty pop music instead, but at least they remembered where they came from, which was nice.

THE VERDICT

    I didn't hate this movie as much as I thought I would, even though I still didn't like it. One thing I mention here though is that I am not this movie's target audience. My 2 year-old daughter loved this movie, and ever since has been asking over and over to watch it again. So that must mean they must have done something right. So bottom line, if you have younger kids they may enjoy this movie, but most film connoisseurs will have a tough time digesting this one.
 
 

RATING: D +

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